What a wonderful Emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Stewart spat out the pretense
the show’s other guests swallowed — that he was talking with journalists who
were hosting a bona fide debate — and confronted them with how phony and
pathological it all was: “I would love to see a debate show… To do a
debate would be great. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about
athletic competition.”

But the Jon Stewart jester mode of political commentary may be proving itself
to be a cure worse than the disease.

As an illustration: the other day some of my progressively-minded friends
posted or forwarded sarcastically-annotated versions of the same “news” clip in
which Heather Nauert, a spokesperson for the
U.S. State
Department, blah-blahed some banal spokesperson pabulum about
U.S./German
relations:

“Looking back in the history books, today is the
71st anniversary of the speech that announced the
Marshall Plan. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the
D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very
long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship
with the government of Germany.”

This was seized upon as a Gaffe (that is: How could the
D-Day invasion of Germany be an example of
our strong relationship with the German government! Ha ha!), and #Resist-ers
across America began to fling it hither and yon.

“D-Day is not really the thing you want to cite when you’re talking about the strength of the relationship between the U.S. and Germany.” pic.twitter.com/UOCoGY5bSH

First off, this is stupid. It’s no more of a gaffe to say that
D-Day is an important milestone in
American relations with the current German government than to say that
Lafayette is an important figure in the history of French relations with the
current American government. (Quick history lesson for those of you who came
out of the U.S.
public school system: The current German government is a direct descendant of
the Federal Republic of Germany that was constructed after the Nazis were
overthrown in the Allied invasion of which
D-Day was a part. The
U.S. was an
important part of that operation. Konrad Adenauer, who would become the first
leader of this new German government, got his start in post-war German politics
when U.S. forces
installed him as mayor of Cologne.)

That is to say, there isn’t even a gaffe here, really, unless you’re really
stretching the term to mean “saying something that might be willfully
misinterpreted by people who are already hostile to you.”

But secondly, and more importantly, this constant hair-trigger alertness for
Gaffes and Gotchas — this reflex to play Daily Show: The Home
Game — is a narcotic that acts as a substitute for effective action.
Sharing a Gaffe is delightful comedy to those who are already inclined to
laugh and who aren’t sick of the joke already, but it’s nothing but a pathetic
blank cartridge in any actual battle against those in power.

If you are addicted to this narcotic, I have to ask: How many more times do you
think it will it thrill you to post a clip showing that a Fox News anchor has
biased double-standards, a politician is unprincipled, a #MAGA-zombie is
ignorant, Trump lies, and so forth? I hope the answer is “many more times”
because Fox News and the politicians and the #MAGA-zombies and the Donald are
going to keep being two-faced ignorant hypocritical liars while they keep
enacting their agenda while folks like you keep “destroying” them on Twitter.
You’ll love it.

But when you act as though you’ve discovered a damning and damaging smoking gun
every time you see Sean Hannity making an idiot of himself or catch Trump
popping off falsehoods, you’re mistaking professional wrestling for athletic
competition in a context that makes Crossfire look like
the Socratic Dialogues.

Catching Trump lying and making a big deal about it implies that you are
shocked. That you expected the president to be honest and he disappointed you.
It means you’re either pretending to be a rube for comedic effect or, well,
that you are a rube. And that joke’s been told, so it’s not a good look.

Pretend for a moment that you’ve won. You found The Final Gaffe that proves
without a doubt that Fox News is a propaganda machine; that politicians blather
in whatever way they think will make them look good and don’t give a damn for
the good of the country; that Trump is a pathological liar and sociopath with
repulsive ideas and dangerous, cruel policies; that the #MAGA-zombies are an
authoritarian cult of incurious dopes with lynch-mob desires. It’s
incontrovertible. You’ve proven your point. You win.

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